At Koshien (A Japanese high school baseball tournament), Nintendo also held a big Splatoon tournament featuring teams from all over Japan. Watching high level players play Splatoon is a lot of fun, and I would recommend it if you get a chance, but the bigger news was that there was going to be a live concert featuring Callie and Marie, the two squid performers that deliver the news every time you load up Splatoon.
Hatsune Miku held her first live concert in Japan back in 2009 and there have been many more concerts in this vein since then. Even in the US it's not that unusual. We've had virtual Micheal Jackson and Tupac perform posthumously. Even the previously mentioned Hatsune Miku performed on The Late Show with David Letterman. What's impressive is that Splatoon hasn't even been out a year yet, but that game has taken over Japan by storm. I mentioned in my GOTY blog that the game does an amazing job building that world, and since the game's release it has slowly grown into something crazy. Something that can allow a live concert featuring two in-game characters. After the first two blocks of the tournament, the concert happened (this was at about 3:30am EST), and it was a great show.
The show started with a news broadcast similar to the ones in the game talking about the concert (The Squid Sisters speak their non-existent Nintendo gibberish language, but the subtitles were in Japanese). Then the show began proper, and I'm not going to lie, it was weird at first. After a bit you get used to it, but seeing these characters sing and dance while the crowd is going nuts is an awesome sight. They performed their 4-5 songs in the game, and the live band absolutely killed it, they were extended variations of the songs in the game. The animators behind this also did a fantastic job, I was expecting mostly in-game animations with some lip-syncing, but they had dance routines for each song, with callbacks to some of the ingame stuff (aka the Splatfest dancing). It wasn't a long concert, but seeing it livestreamed with the crowd going nuts (on NicoNico comments appear on the stream if you let them, so you got swarms of 88888888 (applause) and squid emotes. くコ:彡くコ:彡くコ:彡
As someone who loved Splatoon and its soundtrack, this was a joy to watch. It also made me wonder how far Nintendo could take Splatoon in the future, in-game and outside of it. Splatoon 2 (Spla2n) on the NX would be a huge thing for it in Japan. Nintendo has slowly put out official merchandise for the game, and it seems like a no-brainer to eventually put out clothing based on the items in game. The future is bright for Splatoon. Two things I would personally love to see: First, a Splatune Live CD; second, blow this up, add all of your fictional bands and make a full fledged concert out of this. Hightide Era, ABXY, and DJ Octavio along with the Squid Sisters in a Splatoon Music festival would be big. Here's a video of the concert to see it for yourself.
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